Gerard Gallant
Gerard is a professional software developer with more than 25 years of full-stack experience. In 2021 he took over the AWS Systems Architect responsibilities at Dovico and assumed the CIO role. He's a huge fan of WebAssembly having written the book "WebAssembly in Action", did the technical review of "Server-Side WebAssembly", and has spoken on and written a number of articles on the subject. Most recently, Gerard founded SDA Bytes to help organizations with their employee training.
Proposals - Montreal 2027
Local-First Web Development
In this talk, you'll learn what Local-First is and why you may want to choose it instead of the traditional web development model. We'll create a simple web application to showcase how this can be implemented using either SQLite or PGLite and PowerSync or ElectricSQL respectively for the sync with the server.
AI in the Browser
Running AI in the browser brings several advantages like privacy where the user’s data never leaves the device, lower server costs, lower AI costs, less latency, and the ability to run offline. In this talk, we’ll look at several options for running AI locally from browser built-in models to libraries that leverage Wasm, WebGPU, or WebNN. While local AI brings advantages, we’ll also discuss when this might not be the best solution.
Wasm and WASI Debugging
When Wasm was first released, debugging was a challenge. You were limited to a printf approach where you'd send information to the console. Or, you could use the browser’s developer tools to step through the WebAssembly Text Format (WAT). While those options still exist, debugging improvements have been made. In this talk, we’ll look at the original approaches and then dig into newer options like DWARF, LLDB, or GDB.
Working with the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI)
WASI gives you a secure way to work with WebAssembly (Wasm) outside the browser in places like edge, serverless, IoT, containers via Wasm shims, and more. WASI 0.3 also recently brought native async support to the Component Model. In this talk you’ll learn what WASI is, how it works, where you can use it, and how to create a WASI component. We'll also take a look at what's coming next for WASI.
The State of WebAssembly
In the 10 years since the WebAssembly (Wasm) MVP, the specification has reached 3.0 and there have been a lot of useful features added. In this talk, you’ll learn what Wasm is and how it works, see some demos of features that you can take advantage of now, and then we’ll look at what’s coming.
